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OpenSolaris vs. Linux Kernel Benchmarks

05-14-2009, 03:00 AM

Phoronix: OpenSolaris vs. Linux Kernel Benchmarks

Earlier this week we delivered benchmarks of Ubuntu 9.04 versus Mac OS X 10.5.6 and found that the Leopard operating system had performed better than the Jaunty Jackalope in a majority of the tests, at least when it came to Ubuntu 32-bit. We are back with more operating system benchmarks today, but this time we are comparing the performance of the Linux and Sun OpenSolaris kernels. We had used the Nexenta Core Platform 2 operating system that combines the OpenSolaris kernel with a GNU/Ubuntu user-land to that of the same Ubuntu package set but with the Linux kernel. Testing was done with both 32-bit and 64-bit Ubuntu server installations.

Comment

Depends on CPU - AFAIK it automatically boots 64-bit kernel on a capable CPU, falling back to 32-bit when CPU doesn't support it. So if Michael used a recent CPU (it is likely he did) it should have been a 64-bit kernel.

Comment

So we are saying Mac OS X > Linux > Solaris here? If you ask me that sounds weird. I would prefer running Solaris in a hostile production environment and would venture into running Linux only after exercising caution but I would never want to run OSX even on moderately busy production server no matter what.

Even ignoring my personal beliefs and going with the mainstream ones, it sounds like Micahel should stick in a disclaimer of sorts just to save the innocent some pain (One would feel tempted to buy a Xserver and run their production server on OSX after reading the results of these benchmarks! )

But anyway I do think these benchmarks serve a good purpose - no harm in making Linux faster in all benchmarks, relevant or not!

Comment

Depends on CPU - AFAIK it automatically boots 64-bit kernel on a capable CPU, falling back to 32-bit when CPU doesn't support it. So if Michael used a recent CPU (it is likely he did) it should have been a 64-bit kernel.

So since he used a Core duo 2, 32 bit Linux had a huge disadvantage. Hopefully he can do the test again with 64 bit Jaunty and ext4. IMO that would be more accurate

Comment

So we are saying Mac OS X > Linux > Solaris here? If you ask me that sounds weird.

It sounds weird, because it wasn't real-world benchmark. Compare those results to previous Linux vs Open Solaris test. There wasn't huge difference between them. Also, if you look at previous kernel benchmarks it will probably be even more weird for you. As someone said:

Reality has no place here

I would prefer running Solaris in a hostile production environment and would venture into running Linux only after exercising caution...

Saner defaults, lesser need to update, better behavior under insane load, unreasonable expectations of backward compatibility etc. - mostly the type of things which you don't want to deal with. In a very chaotic, shared environment where it proves to be a better guard against stupid, careless people. That plus KSSL - transparent crypto acceleration on T2 boxes is a feature that is very useful for providing security to applications that either don't understand crypto or where there is loss of performance doing excessive amount of SSL (JVM 1.4 for e.g.).

I am sure most of those things could be dealt with when going with Linux but people just don't want to care anymore